E.J. V'Kanty

  Does anyone remember MSN Groups? The good old days of the internet! One of the groups I belonged to back in the day offered a little bit of everything. I remember there were threads for PSP tutorials, kink talk, horror movie discussions, and paranormal topics. One year, there was a contest for the best Halloween short story. That’s how this horror story was born. I didn’t even give it much planning or outlining. I just sat down with pen in hand (I used to write everything out and type it up later in Word until I realized how much unnecessary work was involved in that process.) So, I wrote Princesses out in an afternoon. I won the contest. Since that first draft, I have revised and added to the story until it became the polished story that I included in Whispers From Hell: An Anthology of Horror and the Supernatural . Here’s a taste of Princesses :        I find myself reminiscing about our first meeting and their consecutive visits. I imagine...

  There was a place where my family used to go camping. A few yards from the place where we would always set up camp, there was a path that descended down to a large creek. The path was shrouded in trees and it really felt like you were descending down into a hidden realm. This path and the daydreams I had of this path served as the basis for A Requiem for the Damned . From those minimal beginnings, I became fascinated by the idea of discovering a secret village far removed from the rest of civilization. I imagine that such a place would be part paradisaical  but with evil horrors unlike anything we see in the modern world. As for Princesa Moreno, I can’t say what inspired her creation. I do like to see women cast as villains in horror. There are so few examples of female villains specifically in the horror genre and that was starting to change until recently. Today, casting a woman as an unredeemable villain is a no-no, but I have a habit of defying the rules. Here’s a ...

  This was one of the first short stories I wrote and it’s not difficult to see that I was inspired to write it after watching Tremors (1990) for the first time. In creating my own story about creatures that arise to threaten all of mankind, I wanted something less obvious. I thought creatures that would have survived for who-knows-how-long would have to be small and less intrusive yet deadly. I also wanted to make a final girl the focus of the story, picking up her experience in the middle. Brette’s journey prior to arriving on the Lighthouse Point public park bench remains largely unknown. We can only imagine the horrors she endured before making her way back into town. Take a brief look into Brette’s Discovery :      Perhaps it was this familial instinct that caused him to take a second look at the girl sitting alone on the park bench not far from the bus stop. Or maybe he glanced back out of simple curiosity. Whatever the reason, he was the only one t...

I can’t say where each element of Kylie’s Reality came from or what inspired me to write this story. I do remember that Julia’s part of the story was inspired by a local urban legend in my WNY state hometown. Briefly, the legend involves a couple of 20-something men who pick up a hitchhiking coed. She asks them to drop her off just outside of a cemetery and, as she flees from their vehicle, she leaves her purse behind. Seeking to return the girl’s purse, the driver looks for her driver’s license and returns the purse to the address on the license. Upon knocking on the door, an elderly woman answers the door and claims the purse as belonging to her daughter who was killed in a hit and run accident on that very highway 25 years earlier. Otherwise, I would have to say the rest of the story is entirely a figment of my imagination. I will say that Kylie’s part of the story was challenging to write. While I can usually throw myself into any character, I found it difficult to form the dial...